Robert M. Christie Views the Future as if Facts Matter.

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Urban Agriculture and the New Great Transformation

One of the most informative websites out there, if you are interested in the fate of humanity on the planet, is http://www.resilience.org. The site offers a wide range of original and republished articles on the full range of matters related to getting to a place where climate and the other converging crises of our time can be mitigated and human groups can become more resilient and prosper in a post-carbon world. I just read an article by Jody Tishmack there, which I consider well worth anyone reading. It is titled, “Urban and Small Farm Agriculture.”

Jody Tishmack reports on research showing that expanding agriculture into cities could improve food security, ecosystem health, and have other benefits as well. I would suggest that such efforts will become increasingly necessary as the global industrial agriculture system begins to collapse of its own fossil-fueled weight.

Riverpark Farm, New York City

The developments Tishmack describes are certainly heartening, not only for the community spirit and potential for continued development of major local/regional movements in urban agriculture. They also represent something even deeper and more important than she acknowledges in this article. This kind of work not only IS doing something about climate change, it will be an ever more important component of the New Great Transformation of human social organization that at this point appears to be the only viable collective response to the converging global crises of climate chaos, ecosystem destruction, economic disintegration, and political corruption.

After over a decade of research on the emergence and acceleration of these crises, I have concluded that the greatest chance to act to counter them is to act locally and cooperate regionally. The exponential growth of the global economic system, including industrial agriculture, is definitively unsustainable, as is mathematically demonstrated in renowned physicist Geoffrey West’s important 2017 book, Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of life in Organisms, Cities, economies, and Companies.

The governments of the world are so far behind the exponential growth of the converging crises of our era that we cannot count on getting them to do anything serious to address them. They remain pawns of the petro-chemically driven corporate system of growth that refuses to face scientific facts. National protests over political catastrophes and corruption are important symbolic expressions of objection to such failures, then everyone gets in their SUVs and hybrids and goes home.

“Druid’s Garden” permaculture organic farm

We have already entered a New Great Transformation of the global economic, climate, and ecological systems, which barring massive intervention is leading to widespread collapse of living Earth systems, from local ecosystems to global climate. The primary question is whether we can act comprehensively and quickly enough to avoid widespread societal collapse. We will not be able to thwart the imminent collapse of industrial agriculture by convincing agribusiness to “go organic” or stop using neonic’s or GMOs. The most viable way to RESIST failing institutions is to turn away and create new social formations to REPLACE THEM.